So this page turned out pretty-okay.
Oh, I have a cool thing for you. It’s this guy doing The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Amazing, detailed inkwork, and he’s already posted some stories like this one.
Seriously, this is some stunning inkwork. One of the things I’ve learned after even a few years of drawing is that good inking is more than just copying an object’s outline. Skilled inkwork distinguishes among different materials–wood, ivory, stone, metal–with a few flourishes of the pen, without having to resort to heavy-handed Photoshop manipulation and patterns. It’s an extraordinary skill (one I certainly haven’t mastered), and one that’s appreciated less and less as major comic books increasingly rely on heavy-handed coloring techniques. And it’s a hard skill to master, since (in my experience at least) there’s a lot of trial and error involved. How do you ink a metal control panel that looks different from a granite floor? I have no idea, so I end up fiddling around hoping to get lucky, or flipping through books filled with good inking and hoping to hit upon something I can try to mimic. It’s a laborious and finicky process that exercises a different part of the brain from basic perspective and anatomy.
It’s true – that kind of inking seems almost like creating a small, visual language which most readers can recognize automatically. And knowing how many little rectangles to use to adequately convey “brick” on a small, distant house. Too few, not noticed, too many, the house becomes an inky mess.
What’s happening in last panel? It’s like everything is in the periphery of the caption, a soldier on horse or something by the top left, the panel itself breaking apart (or a broken speech bubble or is it a saber?) by the top right… Probably Maresh is just falling because of lack of blood but I don’t see that panel any clear at all.
It could be simple blood loss, but my personal suspicion regarding the last panel is that the sorcerer is using a command to compel his yield, possibly with something having coated the arrow they fired into him.
Sorry for the lack of clarity there. Maresh is, in fact, simply pitching over because he’s been shot in the chest.
So these guys work for Darumatha or what?